--- GOP comments about the December 2017 GOP tax cut (discussed here)
Trying to grasp what is going on is now is like trying to take a drink from a firehose. It will slap your lips around, like dog lips in the breeze, but you'll still be thirsty. 😲
The New York Magazine Intelligencer section writes on the increasingly obvious disconnects between conservative and populist rhetoric and behavior (CPRB) compared to actual contradicting reality. One crumbling bastion of CPRB ideology is the lie that “undocumented immigrants are a scourge of American society, a nefarious invading army that’s depriving native-born workers of precious jobs, filling our cities with crime, and leeching off our welfare programs.” That lie is made obvious by the government declaring many immigrants working in essential functions such as food production and distribution as “essential workers” doing work that the Department of Homeland Security considers such people to be, e.g., “critical to the food supply chain.”
The NYM article points out that, while the current administration has done a lot to go after undocumented immigrants, it has done almost nothing to go after the illegal employers who hires them, including the president himself.
The contradictory reality is that wealthy people and interests use their undeniable political power to favor themselves and their interests. They buy influence in our corrupt pay-to-play political system. The market and its workings do not constitute a meritocracy. Governments, shaped by self-interests of donors, create and control markets, money, and corporations and the rules of operation.
Of course, this lie will die hard. CPRB on this point was obvious when the GOP’s initial cash relief proposal was less assistance to Americans too poor to pay federal taxes than to earners making $75,000 a year. Recent data indicates that most tax cut and bailout benefits are going to the rich. That isn't invisible hand and meritocracy. It is bought and paid for government service by the wealthy for the wealthy. The marketplace is immoral and political, not amoral and apolitical.
WaPo writes: “Autopsies have shown some people’s lungs fill with hundreds of microclots. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or heart attack. ..... ‘The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot,’ Kaplan said. ‘We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.’”
Other bizarre, almost impossible symptoms in some patients, are being reported as anecdotes. WaPo writes: “Increasingly, doctors also are reporting bizarre, unsettling cases that don’t seem to follow any of the textbooks they’ve trained on. They describe patients with startlingly low oxygen levels — so low that they would normally be unconscious or near death — talking and swiping on their phones. Asymptomatic pregnant women suddenly in cardiac arrest. Patients who by all conventional measures seem to have mild disease deteriorating within minutes and dying at home.”
When it comes to the pathology of this virus, we do not yet know what we are dealing with.
The NYT writes: “The unexpected new finding makes clear that the virus was circulating in the Bay Area of California as early as January, even before the federal government began restricting travel from China on Feb. 2. It also raises new questions about where else the virus might have been spreading undetected. ..... The new test results made public late Tuesday show that even this timeline failed to reveal how long the virus had been circulating. Ms. Dowd had not recently traveled outside the country, the authorities said, and yet she died a full 20 days before the earliest recorded case of community transmission. Another previously unconnected death in Santa Clara County, on Feb. 17, has also now been linked to the coronavirus. ‘Each one of those deaths is probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size,’ Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s medical officer, said in an interview.”
“In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several ‘potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections’ and repeatedly described by the president as a potential ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus.
‘I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,’ he said in his statement. ‘I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.’”
This definitely is not going well, despite contrary claims from the president, his enablers and propagandists, and his deceived rank and file supporters. The last group is one that is going to pay the biggest price in all of this. The kleptocrats and blowhards at the top will be just fine, except for the few that get infected and die from it.
Trying to grasp what is going on is now is like trying to take a drink from a firehose. It will slap your lips around, like dog lips in the breeze, but you'll still be thirsty. 😲
The New York Magazine Intelligencer section writes on the increasingly obvious disconnects between conservative and populist rhetoric and behavior (CPRB) compared to actual contradicting reality. One crumbling bastion of CPRB ideology is the lie that “undocumented immigrants are a scourge of American society, a nefarious invading army that’s depriving native-born workers of precious jobs, filling our cities with crime, and leeching off our welfare programs.” That lie is made obvious by the government declaring many immigrants working in essential functions such as food production and distribution as “essential workers” doing work that the Department of Homeland Security considers such people to be, e.g., “critical to the food supply chain.”
The NYM article points out that, while the current administration has done a lot to go after undocumented immigrants, it has done almost nothing to go after the illegal employers who hires them, including the president himself.
The invisible hand vs visible rich people’s hands
Another pillar of CPRB ideology that has crumbled under the weight of obvious contradictory reality is the lie that the market is an apolitical thing that the impartial invisible hand governs. According to this vicious lie, (1) wealthy people and interests earn their gains fair and square, and therefore government usually (~always) cannot justify redistributing wealth from the top to lower levels, while (2) the working poor
contribute no more value than what they are worth to the impartial invisible hand.The contradictory reality is that wealthy people and interests use their undeniable political power to favor themselves and their interests. They buy influence in our corrupt pay-to-play political system. The market and its workings do not constitute a meritocracy. Governments, shaped by self-interests of donors, create and control markets, money, and corporations and the rules of operation.
Of course, this lie will die hard. CPRB on this point was obvious when the GOP’s initial cash relief proposal was less assistance to Americans too poor to pay federal taxes than to earners making $75,000 a year. Recent data indicates that most tax cut and bailout benefits are going to the rich. That isn't invisible hand and meritocracy. It is bought and paid for government service by the wealthy for the wealthy. The marketplace is immoral and political, not amoral and apolitical.
We still do not know much about this virus - it is getting creepier
The Washington Post reports that doctors are starting to report new complications associated with SARS CoV-2. This is unsettling, but the reporting is still anecdotal. WaPo writes that some patients, about 20-40%, develop blood clots despite being given anticoagulants that should prevent clots. Also, anecdotal reports of damage to kidney, heart, intestine, liver and brain continue to come in. Initial thinking was that the virus would attack the lungs like similar respiratory viruses. The damage to other organs is tentatively linked to a damaging inflammatory reaction (a cytokine storm) the virus causes in some people. Nearly half the hospitalized people have blood or protein in their urine, which indicates kidney damage.WaPo writes: “Autopsies have shown some people’s lungs fill with hundreds of microclots. Errant blood clots of a larger size can break off and travel to the brain or heart, causing a stroke or heart attack. ..... ‘The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot,’ Kaplan said. ‘We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.’”
Other bizarre, almost impossible symptoms in some patients, are being reported as anecdotes. WaPo writes: “Increasingly, doctors also are reporting bizarre, unsettling cases that don’t seem to follow any of the textbooks they’ve trained on. They describe patients with startlingly low oxygen levels — so low that they would normally be unconscious or near death — talking and swiping on their phones. Asymptomatic pregnant women suddenly in cardiac arrest. Patients who by all conventional measures seem to have mild disease deteriorating within minutes and dying at home.”
When it comes to the pathology of this virus, we do not yet know what we are dealing with.
Tracking the virus
America is still woefully incapable of large scale testing for current infections (swab up the nose) and for antibodies in the blood people who have recovered from an infection, which sometimes they may not have known they had. The New York Times reports that data from California strongly suggests that the virus had been spreading for weeks in the US public weeks before there was any evidence of this. That raises the possibility that the same thing could have been happening in other states. It has taken until now to test the body of an infected woman who died on Feb. 6.The NYT writes: “The unexpected new finding makes clear that the virus was circulating in the Bay Area of California as early as January, even before the federal government began restricting travel from China on Feb. 2. It also raises new questions about where else the virus might have been spreading undetected. ..... The new test results made public late Tuesday show that even this timeline failed to reveal how long the virus had been circulating. Ms. Dowd had not recently traveled outside the country, the authorities said, and yet she died a full 20 days before the earliest recorded case of community transmission. Another previously unconnected death in Santa Clara County, on Feb. 17, has also now been linked to the coronavirus. ‘Each one of those deaths is probably the tip of an iceberg of unknown size,’ Dr. Sara Cody, Santa Clara County’s medical officer, said in an interview.”
Incompetence and corruption
The president’s handling of this at the federal level has been incompetent and literally corrupt. The corruption includes his now-abandoned attempts to foist a possibly lethal hydroxyquinoline treatment on people, presumably in return for campaign contributions. In a different article, the NYT writes:“In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several ‘potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections’ and repeatedly described by the president as a potential ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus.
‘I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,’ he said in his statement. ‘I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.’”
This definitely is not going well, despite contrary claims from the president, his enablers and propagandists, and his deceived rank and file supporters. The last group is one that is going to pay the biggest price in all of this. The kleptocrats and blowhards at the top will be just fine, except for the few that get infected and die from it.
